July 11, 2024 · 12:01 pm

All the Sinners Bleed: Ah, now this is a mystery

S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed was a refreshing reminder that mysteries do not have to be badly written, predictable garbage (see my very recent experience reading Ruth Ware) and can, instead, hold rich writing, subtle characters and engaging plot.

Following the first black sheriff in Charon county (some southern town that is as much a character in the book as any of the people) (as an aside – how bananas is it that police officers are elected) as he investigates a serial killer, the book cares in equal measure for the thriller plot points that kept this reader up late as it does about the social context where seven black children could go missing with their disappearances uninvestigated for years. With some side plots about white supremacists protecting statues of confederate leaders and other threads following the aggressions that fill his day the reader sees the complexity and injustice Titus has to sit in or respond to just to do his job.

*spoiler: I appeciated, too, that the serial killer was not – as I spent most of the book assuming – a character we’d spent time with as readers, so it wasn’t a whodunnit so much as a thriller-mystery focused on Titus and how he finds the killer.

And some exceptional descriptions of dinner.

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July 3, 2024 · 4:16 pm

One Perfect Couple: Like its reality TV show counterpart, irresistible and terrible

I am way at a cottage with L. and B. and our kids and so wanted a book I could read in the four minute spurts between needing to find someone their bathing suit or reading someone else Robert Munch or chasing someone else with a bottle of sunscreen. Cue a best selling thriller – Ruth Ware’s One Perfect Couple.

What great timing for a book about a reality TV show that features couples brought together on a remote island to undergo some challenges and through the challenges break up some couples and couple-swap. Great timing because K. just recommended “Perfect Match” which is – minus the murder – the same plot of this reality TV show and so watching and reading them at the same time served to consolidate my sense of self-loathing for giving any of my time (never mind my reading and viewing time) to such terrible media.

Terrible in the case of One Perfect Couple because while the premise and opening chapters promise enthralling thriller where you can sink into a page-turning ripper it just… doesn’t deliver. I’d be more inclined to read the novel version of the reality show the novel begins with (but I guess I’m already watching the show). As the book progresses and the survivors of the giant storm are trying to keep alive, there’s a ‘murderer’ only it isn’t any kind of whodunnit so much as there’s a guy killing people and everyone else sort of lets it happen until they don’t. So maybe it’s trying to be an exploration of how good people stand by and let bad things happen? Or because it’s the women who ultimately come together to stop the Bad Man it’s meant to be a feminist take down? I suppose either are plausible, but neither really come together in the end. Instead we’re left with a sort of shrug of complicity and eventual spur to action with a less than satisfying climax where you can already anticipate how things will go.

Maybe the most interesting is whether I keep watching Perfect Match. Oh that’s true, as suspenseful as One Perfect Couple, which is to say: not at all suspenseful. Of course I will.

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July 3, 2024 · 3:53 pm

Prophet Song: Near perfect, but also heartbreaking

I don’t know if you should read Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. I mean you really should because it’s some of the most beautiful writing I’ve read in recent memory. And you should because the dystopian near future (or present depending on where you live) of far right government arbitrary detention and state sponsored murder and denial of rights and limitations on movement and futile attempts to escape matters. And you should because the yearning of a mother to protect her children and maintain their innocence (and life) echoes for days. But goddddd is it depressing. So you know, make your own choices, but this one is really, really good.

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July 3, 2024 · 3:24 pm

The Wager: Fun summer read of mutiny and murder (and a dose of colonial introspection)

David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is spectacularly good. Non-fiction, spectacularly good you say? Well, willing to try because it’s as close to historical fiction as it comes while still being non-fiction. Told with all the narrative oomph you’d expect of a thriller, The Wager charts (get it? a nautical joke?) the efforts of the British navy in the mid 1700s to secretly capture a Spanish ship filled with gold and treasure in some hard-to-understand war between the two empires.

From the beginning the expedition seems doomed. The book catalogues the near-impossible effort of just finding enough sailors as almost everyone – rightfully – viewed naval war as doom and ran away. Like soldiers running through the street capturing any able-ish bodied man or boy and forcing them on board. As you can imagine truly committed to the war effort. And then setting out with barely a plan, at the wrong time of year, with not the right crew and you can imagine things did not Go Well. Enter lots of waves and broken ship parts and some light cannibalism and casual encounters with naval battle.

After the ship wreck (spoiler: there is a ship wreck) and the mutiny and the two incredibly improbable successful returns to England, what really captivates -and what Grann does so well to weave throughout the book – is the importance of owning narrative. As the two different groups try to persuade the public and the naval authorities of their version of events the reader comes to recognize the way the very history they’re reading – contested, partial, necessarily incomplete – does similar work. Toward the end and in the concluding chapters Grann makes more explicit the way Britain and all empires used this narrative authority to justify their colonial ambitions and violence, and the way this pattern of declaring authority by means of ‘owning the narrative’ persists in the present.

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